MentalEdge

Spotify didn't lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.

What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.

If the "pot" is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.

This guy didn't make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.

They only get stopped when they get big enough for the giant music labels to notice.

You and me might buy our music on bandcamp, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people still just pay for spotify and never give how it works a second thought.

A moderetely successful indie artist is still likely to make way more having their albums on streaming services, than they are selling them on bandcamp.

you can't really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.

Is that what I'm doing? At no point did I say streaming services could be fair and good if only this one issue was fixed. Merely that play farming works by skimming the money from real artists.

Now, I'd also like to ask "wtf", since you are kinda suggesting that it is the artist's that are at fault for not getting the money they need to live, by not using their own websites/bandcamp.

That makes no sense.

Vandeley wasn't always evil. Roxanne, Peppermint, Macaron, Korsica, all wanted the company to do good, and for a long while it did.

Vandeley only became "evil" because Kale mind-controlled Roxanne and made himself CEO.

I don't know how that's anti-corporate. A big part of the plot is that Vandeley grew so successful because it was a genuinely good company doing good things in the world, loved by all, before it became a dystopian world-conquering device at the hands of a villain.

Embracer at least had the excuse of fucking up their capital and shitting the bed in terms of having money on hand.

They were forced to shutter and sell things because they legitimately couldn't fund their operation.

It was still their fault, because they stupidly bought up developers thinking big investor money was coming, which then just didn't.

Microsoft has no such excuse. MS leadership has been asked multiple times why they did it, and they literally haven't said a single fucking word that makes sense.

The "royalty payers" are the streaming subscribers, and they pay the same amount regardless of how much they listen to.

The different streaming services have different payment models, but Spotify at least works by first taking their cut from subscribtion income each month.

Then, the rest is evenly distributed to the plays that month.

By inflating the playcount with bots, this guy gets a bigger share, at the expense of everyone elses plays becoming worth less.

None of the services have some infinite money glitch where more plays just means more money out of nowhere. How much you get for each play is not a fixed amount, It's always based on how much money actually came in from subscribers, so anyone using bots to tilt the scales, is stealing from everyone else.

TBF, this particular loophole doesn't take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.

And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.

Yeah, this guy is in trouble because he stepped on some big toes, but he curb-stomped a bunch of little guys, too.

Or you could just read the one book eight times for 99.6℅. Why buy more than one when one is enough to read as many times as you like?

SMH, that's not how books work. What a complete waste of money. You only needed to buy one copy, to then read it twice.

Spotify is losing nothing. They take their cut either way.

The only people getting their money stolen are real artists. Their share of the income shrinks as these scammers inflate the number of plays that the money is shared between.

AFAIK YT Music does this. The money from your subscription gets divided amongst whatever you listened to.

That still wouldn't address the stolen account problem, but yes, it'd be a huge improvement.

I have no idea why Spotify still sticks to this massively exploitable model, except for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.

No.

By inflating his own playcounts, the value of each play goes down. All that money he got? Came straight out of the pockets of real artists.

No.

Music play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.

Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.

Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an "artist".

Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays becoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.

Adding AI generation into the mix is barely an innovation.

Edit: And if you're wondering how it works with services that don't have a free tier, it is done by hijacking peoples real accounts, then having them stream the relevant tracks over and over. Either by stealing entire accounts, or infecting devices that are already logged in with malware that will open the relevant app/website and play the tracks over and over.